William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 2

Drop into this garden-you feel at home. This orchard is an English orchard; apples, pears, peaches, plums are all English fruit. Here is a potato-ridge; you pull the stalk and find it is an Irish plant. Here, too, are things well known at home, although not grown at home. In Surrey, these grapes would be under glass. These melons would not grow in an English garden; and these pippins and lady-apples, though often seen on English tables, are grown on this Virginian soil. Here we have maize ripening in one corner, tobacco in a second, pea-nuts and sweet potatoes in a third. These roots and fruits are homely things to us, yet homely in a far-off way, much as roses of Sharon and lilies of the valley are familiar to our thoughts. We draw nigh to them and feel at home among them, yet we recognise a sense of difference and of separation that clothes them with poetic charm.

Caught between two fires, burnt alike by North and South, Virginia suffered more in the civil feud than any other State. Nine years ago, when I was last in Richmond, the Capitol looked down on a heap of ruins. Main-street was gutted by fire. Masses of the city, blown up by gunpowder, lay in heaps